Last year ended with a promise of the largest economic reform in a generation.
The Government unveiled its overhaul of resource management laws, which aims to cut the number of consents required by 40-50%.
Led by RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop, the move will replace the decades-old RMA with two laws – one focused on planning and the other on environmental protection.
They’re due to be passed by the end of this year and are expected to be operational by 2029.
But what does it all mean? And why has it taken so long to detangle this convoluted law if so many people agreed it needed to be done?
NZ Herald political editor Thomas Coughlan told The Front Page the RMA encompasses everything.
“The act basically does what it says on the tin. It managed the nation’s resources. From the air that you breathe, to the forest, to the waterways, to the land that you build your house on – they are all managed by the Resource Management Act.
“This one law was passed in 1991. It was a bipartisan Labour and National effort... Prior to that, resources were managed under many different pieces of legislation.
“It was meant to simplify and provide a clear direction on what you could do, where and how. It didn’t quite work like that and, almost since the beginning, the RMA has failed to deliver on that promise of simplicity, of allowing development, allowing New Zealand’s economy to grow, allowing us to build more houses,” he said.
For decades, the legislation has been a point of controversy – especially in the early 2000s when a housing crisis reared its head.
“The Labour Government commissioned a working group, which essentially said we need to repeal this thing and replace it with two different pieces of legislation... But that wasn’t the end of it.
“The Government we currently have, the National-led coalition, didn’t like what Labour did. They thought it was overly complex and replaced one overly complex regime with another.
“So, when the coalition came in, they repealed the repealed RMA. They brought back the RMA, resurrected it. But it will be repealed again. Not many pieces of legislation get to be repealed twice,” Coughlan said.
Changes to five national directives in the RMA have now taken effect, which will make it easier to issue consents for mines and quarries, as well as convert a garage into a granny flat. A few breadcrumbs of change remain until the full reform has gone through the select committee stage and passed into law.
These updates remove the need for a building consent and a resource consent for small, standalone dwellings of up to 70sq m.
These exemptions will save New Zealanders up to $5650 in direct costs when building a granny flat and speed up the process by up to 14 weeks.
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The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
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